Archipelagic American Studies
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Brian Russell Roberts & Michelle Ann Stephens TOWARD A VISION OF THE ARCHIPELAGIC AMER I CAS Every grade- schooler in the United States is taught to view President Thomas Jeﬀerson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase as a landmark event in “American history.” This purchase, as the famous narrative goes, doubled the size of the United States and ousted France (and the threat of its power ful army) from continental North Amer i ca.1 But consider the Louisiana Purchase’s fame in comparison to that of the United States’ nearly forgotten 1941 agreement to build military bases on six British colonial possessions in the Ca ribbean, which President Franklin D. Roo se velt trumpeted as “the most impor tant action in the reinforcement of our national defense . . . since the Louisiana Purchase.”2 Or consider the Louisiana Purchase side by side with President Harry S. Truman’s seldom- discussed Cold War instigation of a US trusteeship in Micronesia, which more than doubled the size of the United States in terms of total land and water area, thereby constitut- ing a massive geo graphical grounding for its emergence as the dominant Pacific power (see figure I.1).3 Juxtaposing the Louisiana Purchase’s fame with these enormously significant yet comparatively unknown events in the Ca ribbean and Pacific, one must ask how the narrative of continental Amer i ca (which has been a geo graph i cal story central to US historiography and self- conception) has so completely eclipsed the narrative of what we are terming “the archipelagic Amer- i cas,” or the temporally shifting and spatially splayed set of islands, island chains, and island- ocean-continent relations which have exceeded US- Americanism and have been aﬃliated with and indeed constitutive of competing notions of the Amer i cas since at least 1492. This archipelagic version of Amer i ca has spanned more than five centuries, and hence the archipelagic Amer i cas are clearly not confined to the islands and waters that have been appropriated by the United States via (to borrow a phrase from Richard Drinnon) the United States’ dedication to “seagoing Manifest Destiny.”4 Yet within the interdisciplinary field of American studies (which has INTRODUCTION ARCHIPELAGIC AMERICAN STUDIES decontinentalizing the study of american culture